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Bentley used NASA technology to take this 53-billion-pixel picture of a car – The Verge

Posted: Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Look at the image above. Pretty nice picture of the Golden Gate bridge, huh? Well, WRONG. It’s actually a pretty nice picture of a $330,000 car, the Bentley Mulsanne. You can’t see the vehicle at this distance, but you can visit Bentley’s website and zoom in yourself. It goes from panoramic view of the bridge, all the way down to a close-up of stitching of the Bentley logo on the passenger headrest.

The carmaker says it fitted together 70 individual photographs to create the image, using the same technology developed by NASA to make panoramas from photographs beamed back by the Curiosity rover on Mars. The resulting image of the Mulsanne contains 53 billion pixels (that’s 53,000 megapixels) and Bentley says that if printed out it would be the same size as a football field.

The carmaker created the image to highlight the “attention to detail” it puts into its products. And sure, if you’re buying a vehicle that costs around six times the average US annual salary (and that’s before adding in any extras), you’re probably right to expect more than the usual level of polish. Still, if I had that sort of money I’d probably skip the Bentley altogether and try and buy some of that NASA tech for myself. Who fancies a replica Curiosity ATV?